Game Development –Introduction: Week 6
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This week as my major task I’ve continued working on the melee enemy animations, this time the skill animation. It’s still not quite finished in color with all layers so I can’t present the finalized, perspective-corrected version. So what I did first, was make a quick 6-frame sketch, like the one for the walk-animation. Most of the animations I’ve made for this game are confined to 6 frames. It looks well enough in-game and balances fluidity with time and effort spent. This unit carries a hammer over the shoulder in the original design, so designing the attack followed from that. The character would grab the hammer with both hands, lift it (and with it the body) and then bring it down across it’s body. I did not actually use any references or look up actual techniques for how one would use two-handed hammer in battle, instead taking my inspiration from what I remembered from practicing martial arts (which also helped a lot with visualising how the body weight would move to give the attack weight and impact). So this time I did not think about primary and secondary actions and rather sketched out the motion as a whole, trying to “feel” the motion as I sketched it. I did however try and apply animation principles on squash and stretch and the distribution of the frames. The first four frames deal with the lifting of the hammer (the preparation) and the other two with bringing it back to starting position. The longer preparation helps make the movement look heavy and focused, which matches the character’s walk. The sketch:
Then I went back to the still-art of the enemy unit and replaced the sketch with clean lines:
Here I added the facial expression to emphasize the effort involved in swinging the hammer. This result was again, like with the walk-animation, stiffer than the sketch. I realized quickly that “moving around bodyparts a little” like with the walk animation would not be an option this time around. So this animation is re-drawn frame by frame, which I think will end up taking twice as much time as the walk-animation, but the results look much more consistent. I ran into some trouble at the coloring phase which is why you will not get to see it here today. I realized that when you do something new, write down what you did at once, documentation is not just for programmers. Or rather that realization hit when after 3 tries, the hue of the enemy still did not match the still art. It worked out alright and it’s all in progress but I’ve learned to write things down and make a color palette for my drawing projects. On the plus side, once I figured out how to recreate the base I could re-use a lot of the layers to create the same light-and-shadow-effects as in the still-art. Bonus unlockable – Frame 2 in the WIP-animation:  |
